I agree with some other posters complaining that half of the post regards how syntax sucks. I don’t need glorious syntax in my build system. It’s a build system

I agree with some other posters complaining that half of the post regards how syntax sucks. I don’t need glorious syntax in my build system. It’s a build system. I want to do the bare minimum work to get my code correct and get back to writing “real code”. I used to work on a project that, at first glance, seemed like a perfect candidate for CMake: portable code, compiled with three different compilers (GCC, another GCC, and another GCC-ish for VxWorks) for four different platforms (x86 Linux, bare metal MIPS, FreeRTOS ARM Cortex M0, VxWorks ARM Cortex A53). It constantly felt like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. Our developers would spend days in “CMake hell” regularly. One issue we had was the verbosity. For us, a specific platform implied a specific architecture, a specific compiler, a specific operating system, specific auxiliary devices, etc. Having developers remember to do -DCMAKE_XXX half a dozen times for every build wasn’t realistic so we scripted it because CMake didn’t support the idea that a toolchain file wasn’t passed on the command line (that I’m aware of). Warnings were another issue. Yes, yes, I know, you’re not supposed to declare warning flags in toolchain files. Too bad that doesn’t scale to many developers (same reason as above). I also disliked that it generated recursive Makefiles. I could not find a way to beat this without changing the directory structure, which was for our project very important (certain portions of our code were standalone libraries only deliverable to certain customers, with different implementations for their specific platforms). This made builds SLOW. I flattened the Makefiles by hand once just for laughs and cut off 60% of our build time (a lot of the build system was networked drives mounted over NFS). CMake isn’t that bad, though. For simple use cases, and small projects, it’s convenient. I just wouldn’t use it at scale for complex projects like above.